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1984 Mercedes Benz 300 Turbo Desiel -- Man, What a Car!Dec 21 '00 Write an essay on this topic.A few years back (ok so it was more than a few it was 1994 to be exact) my husband and I decided we wanted to buy a luxury car on an Escort budget. My husband is a car nut. He loves cars and he reads everything he can about them. He suggested we should consider an older car. He told me that Mercedes Benz diesels were an excellent buy. You see there are two kinds of diesel engines. There are diesel engines that are based on regular gasoline car engines but fitted to use diesel fuel. Then there are diesel engines that are based on diesel truck engines and made specifically to use diesel fuel. It turns out the truck based engines will run forever, while the car based engines have the same life expectancy of any other car engine. Hubby just happened to know that engines in the Mercedes Benz from the early 80s was based on the truck engine. We needed to finance whatever we were going to buy. I was very worried about getting financing for a ten-year-old car. So I went to the credit union to get pre-approved. It turns out there is a special "blue book" called Cars of Particular Interest. This book is limited to very special cars (mostly collectable, antique, rare, or extremely high-end like Lamborgeni) that increase in value. If you want to finance a car that it is listed in Cars of Particular Interest there are special rules. Since the 1984 MB 300 Turbo D was listed in the book we would have no problems financing it. After a long and exhausting search we found an amazing example of the car. It was very, very clean, no body damage or rust, and very well running engine. We had a mechanic look it over and he gave us two thumbs up, so we bought it. This car was a dream. It had all the amentias including: heated leather seats, thermostat controlled heat and A/C, sunroof, AM/ FM Cassette, full-size spare, and huge roomy trunk. The car had 120 thousand miles on it when we got it and we put more than another 100K on it before we gave it up. There were two things about the car I didn't like. 1) Because it was a Turbo Diesel, there was a slight lag time when you wanted to from 0 - really fast in a hurry. In other words, if you had to merge into traffic from a standstill you needed a little more open space for this car. But once the turbo kicked in, you knew it! When the magic moment occurred your head would snap back and you were going 60, 70, or even 80 before you could blink. 2) Diesel fuel turns to jelly when it's cold. The car came equipped with an engine block heater for really cold mornings. Once you plugged in the car, it was ready to go in about 10 - 20 minutes. But when we owned the car this was a real problem. You see we lived in an apartment in a city and had to park the car on the street. Luckily, we don't get very cold mornings very often. However, whenever the weatherman was predicting cold overnight temps, I'd have to drive around the block until a parking spot within 500 feet of our apartment window would be available. Then in the morning, I'd run an extension cord out our apartment window to heat up the fuel so I could start the car. It's a good thing I was young then. If you have a garage or even a driveway next to your house, this wouldn't be a problem for you. Overall, my used car experience was very positive. It provided me with a way to purchase a car with much more luxury that I could ever afford and now I have some stories to tell about the people I met when I was stringing the extension cord out my apartment window at six in the morning.  |
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